After Stockholm, ESI was invited to Washington DC. There Gerald and Kristof introduced ESI to the US think tank community: the US Institute of Peace, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Carnegie Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute. They met senior staff in the State Department, including James o'Brien and James Dobbins, then the architects of US Balkan Policy. They were called by Leon Fuerth, Vice President Gore's chief National Security Advisor in the White House, to discuss on Montenegro.

In the wake of the Kosovo war, most policy initiatives on the Balkans still originated in Washington. There were then more people in the US National Security Council working on the Balkans than on Asia. This was soon to change.